I Bike, You Bike, Ebike

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 572 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Electric bikes are exploding. Not literally—most of the time, anyway—but ebikes are certainly in demand. Companies that operate bikeshare networks are upgrading their ebike fleets as they try to entice more riders to join up. And attracted by a combination of sleek looks and dead-simple operation, more riders than ever are investing in personal ebikes—for commutes, for recreation, or as a practical replacement for the family car.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED editors Adrienne So and Julian Chokkattu join us to talk about Lyft’s new ebike, urban mobility, and the ups and downs of owning your own electric bicycle.

Show Notes:

Read Julian’s story about Lyft’s new ebike here. Read some of Adrienne’s many, many, many ebike reviews. (And here’s a list of the best ebikes for every type of rider.) Also check out Parker Hall’s Ultimate Ears Fits review.

Recommendations:

Adrienne recommends Ultimate Ears Fits custom-fit earbuds for your one-of-a-kind ear holes. Julian recommends playing through your old video game backlog instead of just buying new games all the time. Lauren recommends podcasts by The Cut. Mike recommends The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual by Eben Weiss, aka Bike Snob.

Adrienne So can be found on Twitter @adriennemso. Julian is @JulianChokkattu. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Mike.
0:00.6	Lauren.
0:01.6	Mike, you're a bike guy. In fact, we should probably just call you bike calori, huh?
0:06.8	Please put $5 in the pun jar.
0:09.5	I'm so terrible. I'm sorry. All right. How do you feel about e-bikes?
0:13.3	I love e-bikes. They make cycling more accessible to more people. And, you know, it keeps people out of cars a lot of times because people will choose an e-bike
0:22.3	for a route that they would normally choose for a car so I'm all for them well that's exactly
0:27.5	what we're going to be cycling through today nice yeah nice hello welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired.
0:44.3	And I'm Michael Colori. I'm a senior editor at Wired. And we're also joined this week by Wired Senior Associate Reviews Editor, Adrian So, who joins us from Portland. Hey, Adrian. Hey, guys. And Wired Reviews
0:56.3	Editor Julian Chacatu, who's joining us from New York City. Hey, Julian. Hello. All right, so this is
1:02.1	the e-bike episode. It's everything you've ever wanted to know about e-bikes. If you're a regular
1:06.8	listener of this podcast, or if you read Wired, you know that we like to talk about
1:12.1	bikes. But here's the thing. And this is where I ruin my cred as a tech writer here. I've
1:18.0	never ridden an e-bike. Never. I know. And from what my colleagues here tell me, aka
1:24.2	bike collier, they're fast, they're fun to ride, and they can free up traffic and cut down
1:29.6	on emissions. So today we're talking about both buying and renting e-bikes. In the second half of the
1:35.9	show, Adrian is going to tell us what you need to know about buying an e-bike if you're ready
1:40.9	to make that commitment. But at first, let's talk about just kind of
1:44.2	dipping our toes in. Let's talk about bike sharing. Because Julian, you recently wrote about
1:50.0	Lyft's new e-bike. This is Lyft, the ride sharing company, and they're doing e-bikes. Tell us about
1:56.4	this. Right. So Lyft actually owns several fleets around the country, as they're called their bike-sharing fleets. Many of them have
2:04.6	regular bikes, you know, traditional or analog bikes, however you want to call them. And then some of them are
	...

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